Title: Minimax Multi-Agent Persistent Monitoring of a Network System Show Chinese title

Title: 最小最大多代理网络系统的持续监控

Abstract: We investigate the problem of optimally observing a finite set of targets using a mobile agent over an infinite time horizon. The agent is tasked to move in a network-constrained structure to gather information so as to minimize the worst-case uncertainty about the internal states of the targets. To do this, the agent has to decide its sequence of target-visits and the corresponding dwell-times at each visited target. For a given visiting sequence, we prove that in an optimal dwelling time allocation the peak uncertainty is the same among all the targets. This allows us to formulate the optimization of dwelling times as a resource allocation problem and to solve it using a novel efficient algorithm. Next, we optimize the visiting sequence using a greedy exploration process, using heuristics inspired by others developed in the context of the traveling salesman problem. Numerical results are included to illustrate the contributions. Show Chinese abstract

Abstract: 我们研究了使用移动代理在无限时间范围内观测一组有限目标的最佳观测问题。 该代理的任务是在网络受限的结构中移动以收集信息，从而最小化关于目标内部状态的最坏情况下的不确定性。 为此，代理必须决定其访问目标的顺序及其在每个访问过的目标上的停留时间。 对于给定的访问顺序，我们证明在最优停留时间分配中，所有目标中的峰值不确定性是相同的。 这使我们将停留时间的优化问题转化为资源分配问题，并使用一种新颖高效的算法来解决它。 接下来，我们使用启发式方法优化访问顺序，这些启发式方法借鉴了旅行商问题中开发的方法。 包括数值结果以说明这些贡献。